Every neighborhood in every city of Greece has its bastion of male comradery, the local cafeneion or coffee shop. Unfortunately, most of the grand cafeneia of old have been razed and supplanted by fast food chain outlets. The neighborhood places, with few exceptions, tend to be rather colorless store fronts where retired (or inexplixcably idle) […]
A tour of the Peloponnese reveals one thing above all else: the ubiquitous presence of Greece’s most important tree, the olive tree, which seems to grow just about everywhere here, from craggy mountain slopes deep in the Mani to the great plain of Messinia, to the region’s northern reaches, along the coast of the Corinth […]
Unlike small, meatball-size chick pea fritters elsewhere in Greece and certainly a distant cry from the Egyptian falafel, the Rhodian version turns calls for big, plump filling patties. They are found, in various renditions, all over the island. Pitaroudia with chick peas are by far the national dish of Rhodes.
When I set out to search the foodlore of the Dodecanese, I thought I would find unique and wholly separate customs from island to island. But all the Aegean islands share a terse, pared down cuisine that long ago became the norm of poor sea-bound people in this part of the world. There was always […]